Confirmed Speakers

Matthias (born in 1984, married, 2 children) studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier (ENSCM) and the University of Heidelberg, where he graduated in 2008. After completing his master thesis under the supervision of Prof. Christian Klein, he joined BASF SE in Ludwigshafen for a four-month industrial internship, followed by three months of voluntary social work in Tororo, Uganda. He then moved to the University of Tübingen to work in the group of Prof. Stefan Laufer where he primarily focused on protein kinase inhibitors targeting the Janus kinase (JAK) family. In 2014, Matthias obtained his Ph. D. in pharmaceutical/medicinal chemistry with honors (summa cum laude). He joined the lab of Prof. Karl-Heinz Altmann at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich to pursue postdoctoral research on the total synthesis and biological properties of mycolactones (in cooperation with Prof. Gerd Pluschke, Swiss TPH Basel) and the cell type-specific targeting of antibiotics via­ conjugation to proteins (in cooperation with Prof. Martin Bachmann, Inselspital Bern). He returned to Tübingen in 2017 as a fellow of the Recruitment of Excellent Young Researchers program and accepted a call as assistant professor ("Juniorprofessor") to the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tübingen University in 2019. Recently, he became associate PI in the Cluster of Excellence iFIT ("Image-guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies").

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Mark Murcko has directly contributed to nine marketed drugs spanning glaucoma, HIV, HCV, and CF. He is a founder, board member, and from 2016-2018 was the founding CSO at Relay Therapeutics. Mark is also a Board member, strategic advisor, and from 2018-2021 was the founding CSO and Chief Innovation Officer at Dewpoint Therapeutics. In addition, Mark is a senior lecturer in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, and has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and corporate boards of directors for a diverse range of organizations. Mark was a founding scientist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, joining in 1990, and was the chief technology officer and chair of the SAB until 2021. Mark began his career at Merck, where he helped discover multiple clinical candidates, including carbonic anhydrase inhibitors for the treatment of glaucoma. One of Merck’s development candidates in this area, dorzolamide, became the first marketed drug in pharmaceutical history to result from a structure-based drug design program. He is a co-author on roughly 90 publications and a co-inventor on roughly 50 issued patents. Mark is a member of the Board of Trustees of the GRC and the Board of Overseers of the Boston Museum of Science. He holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Yale.

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Andreas studied chemistry at the University Münster, Germany. After receiving his PhD he did a postdoc with Barry M. Trost at Stanford before then moving into medicinal chemistry as a lab leader with Bayer in 1994. In 2001 he joined Boehringer Ingelheim in Vienna and contributed in multiple late stage kinase lead discovery projects to deliver compounds for the clinic in oncology. Andreas joined GPC Biotech in Munich in 2007 to lead drug discovery teams in oncology and became head of medicinal chemistry with the CRO company Proteros in 2012 for integrated drug discovery projects. In 2022 he joined the hit identification platform HitS of WuXi AppTec as head of medicinal chemistry. Located in Munich at the Crelux site, he is supporting clients in validating and optimizing hits form either of the two hit generation technologies - fragment based drug discovery and DNA-encoded libraries.

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Simona Cotesta received her PhD from the Biochemistry Institute of ETH Zurich in 2002, studying protein flexibility through molecular dynamic simulations. From 2002 to 2005 she was part of the molecular modelling groups of GSK (Verona, IT), Pharmacia (Nerviano, IT) and Roche (Basel, CH) as post-doctoral fellow. In 2005, she joined the Computer Aided Drug Discovery (CADD) team in Novartis (Basel). Currently she is group leader and chemistry project team leader.

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Matthias (born in 1984, married, 2 children) studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier (ENSCM) and the University of Heidelberg, where he graduated in 2008. After completing his master thesis under the supervision of Prof. Christian Klein, he joined BASF SE in Ludwigshafen for a four-month industrial internship, followed by three months of voluntary social work in Tororo, Uganda. He then moved to the University of Tübingen to work in the group of Prof. Stefan Laufer where he primarily focused on protein kinase inhibitors targeting the Janus kinase (JAK) family. In 2014, Matthias obtained his Ph. D. in pharmaceutical/medicinal chemistry with honors (summa cum laude). He joined the lab of Prof. Karl-Heinz Altmann at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich to pursue postdoctoral research on the total synthesis and biological properties of mycolactones (in cooperation with Prof. Gerd Pluschke, Swiss TPH Basel) and the cell type-specific targeting of antibiotics via­ conjugation to proteins (in cooperation with Prof. Martin Bachmann, Inselspital Bern). He returned to Tübingen in 2017 as a fellow of the Recruitment of Excellent Young Researchers program and accepted a call as assistant professor ("Juniorprofessor") to the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tübingen University in 2019. Recently, he became associate PI in the Cluster of Excellence iFIT ("Image-guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies").

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Dr. Nir London completed his PhD in computational structural biology at the Hebrew University in 2012. He then pursued a post-doctoral fellowship with Brian Shoichet at UCSF where he developed a pioneering virtual screening platform for covalent inhibitor discovery. In 2015 Dr. London joined the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he is currently the Alan and Laraine Fischer Career Development Chair in the Dept. of Chemical and Structural Biology. Dr. London’s lab is focused on covalent chemical biology and drug discovery and is developing new technologies to discover and functionalize covalently acting compounds. His honors include amongst others the Alon fellowship, the EFMC award for young medicinal chemist in academia and the ISCB award for young chemical biologist.

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Rui Moreira completed his Master degree at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Lisbon, and obtained his PhD under supervision of Professors Eduarda Rosa (University of Lisbon) and Jim Iley (The Open University). After a postdoctoral stay in the UK, Rui started his career as an independent scientist in Lisbon in 1993 and was promoted to Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in 2006, becoming Head of Department in 2010-2016, and Director of the Research Institute for Medicines (iMed.ULisboa) in 2010-2013. Rui has wide research interests in the fields of Medicinal and Physical Organic Chemistry, covering the development of anti-infectious and anticancer agents, prodrug chemistry, structure-reactivity-metabolism relationships, design of covalent inhibitors, and design of chemical probes for activity- and photoaffinity-based protein profiling. He has published over 160 papers (Researcher ID G-7485-2011 and ORCID ID 0000-0003-0727-9852) and supervised/co-supervised more than 20 PhD students. Rui was co-founder of the Medicinal Chemistry Division of the Portuguese Chemical Society, and as served EFMC as Council member in 2008-2015 and as Executive Committee member since 2015. He is the current EFMC President.

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